What's Armstrong's Return About?

The seven-time winner isn’t coming back just to prove he’s racing clean, or solely to raise awareness about cancer. What else is at stake?

By Joe Lindsey

Don’t take it from me. The entire cycling world is a bit confused about why Lance Armstrong would risk his unblemished run of seven straight Tour de France wins by returning, at age 37, to try for an eighth.

“Why is he really doing this?” wondered Marc Sergeant, director of the Silence-Lotto team of Tour hopeful Cadel Evans.

“Personally the story so far doesn't do it for me,” said Columbia manager Bob Stapleton. “But maybe it is about something bigger. He is passionate about cancer.”

But perhaps Carlos Sastre, the man whose title Armstrong will try to regain as his own, put it best. “If he wants to return, it’s because he believes he has an opportunity,” said the 2008 winner to VeloNews.

An opportunity, yes, but for what?

In the Vanity Fair article by Doug Brinkley that officially chronicles Armstrong’s rationale for ending his three-years old retirement to return to the sport of cycling, Armstrong initially lays out the cancer case:

As if crystal-balling, he imagines himself as president, his aides informing him every day that 1,500 Americans have died from the illness. “Imagine if I go to sleep [in the White House] and I wake up the next day and they come in the afternoon and aides say, ‘Another 1,500 died today, sir.’ I can figure that out. That’s a fucking problem! So there’s 1,500 … 1,500 … 1,500 … I mean, after 20, 30, 40 years of that, people start to take that as just part of the deal. And it shouldn’t be.”

Armstrong tells of how, on that bike ride with the POTUS, he made his request to President Bush for a billion dollars for the National Cancer Institute (unanswered). Doug Ulman, head of the LAF, possibly pushing the hyperbole a bit far, says he wants there to be a Cabinet-level position on the disease.

But details are thin. Armstrong promises to lay out the cancer initiative in a press conference on September 24 in New York City, but other than re-warming the story of Armstrong’s personal battle with cancer, the Vanity Fair article does little to lay out how his comeback will truly transform cancer awareness into a global issue (at least, any more than it already is).

One way that it will: the team. Every report on Armstrong’s return has referenced his likely reunion with his old handler, Johan Bruyneel. Even Bruyneel has warmed to the script. After initially brushing off the rumors of a return, Bruyneel allowed that it would be hard to imagine Armstrong racing for another director, and finally saying he would not allow Armstrong to race elsewhere. The band is definitely back together.

At the same time, team officials said publicly that Armstrong will not make his return with Astana. Most other teams are set for riders – even though Armstrong plans to race for free, teams are at their roster limits. It’s hard to believe that Armstrong would race for a team not backed by his longtime equipment sponsors, like Trek, Oakley and Giro, two of whom are already aligned with Astana (and Trek, only with Astana). And forming a new team is out of the question – all of the top talent is already signed for 2009. So if Armstrong is racing for Bruyneel, but isn’t coming back with Astana, how does this work?

Because maybe Bruyneel isn’t returning with Astana either. The cycling team known as Astana is really Olympus Sarl, a holding company based in Luxembourg that is wholly owned by Johan Bruyneel. Bruyneel holds the UCI racing license for the team. His company employs the staff and directors. He owns the team busses and cars, signs the sponsor agreements for equipment and cash and has full operational control over the entire apparatus. Most crucially, when riders sign contracts, they do so with Bruyneel and Olympus, not the Kazakh sponsors. The smart money says get ready for something like Team Livestrong, presented by Nike. And don’t, by the way, expect Alberto Contador to be lieutenant number one.

Contador was diplomatic about the prospect of an Armstrong return, saying “he would be a good teammate and it would be a unique experience.” But he stopped well short of saying he’d ride in the service of an eighth campaign. “I’d love to race with him,” he told VeloNews, adding that the pecking order was not his primary focus right now. “We’ll have more time to reflect on everything once we have time to study all the facts in detail.”

Both Contador and Levi Leipheimer are under contract for 2009, but Leipheimer will be 35 in a month and his chances of winning the Tour are all but over; he may be grumpy about it, but he’ll ride for Lance.

Contador, however, is just 26 and at the height of his powers. He already sat out the 2008 edition of the Tour. Sure, Lance’s comeback is only for one year, but does Contador really want to miss another chance at the Tour? But any team of Armstrong’s is Armstrong’s alone. Much as Bruyneel will deftly extricate the team from its sponsors, he will not risk internal rivalries in the team. That makes Contador’s exit a distinct possibility, despite his contract. Waiting in the wings is the new Katusha team, which lacks a GC contender, but does not lack for money to purchase the contract of even a Tour winner like Contador. So the team is set, and aligned solely under Armstrong and the cancer initiative.

Another primary rationale presented in the Vanity Fair piece, which emerges as more fleshed-out than the cancer advocacy plank, is Armstrong’s desire for redemption and vindication, which Brinkley refers to as “the next station of the cross.”

Since Armstrong’s retirement, the criticism, the doubts and the questions have grown persistently louder. How, we wonder, is it possible that so many of Armstrong’s opponents were guilty of doping, but he was clean? Given what we know of the effectiveness of oxygen-vector doping, how is this possible?

Armstrong never tested positive, Brinkley reminds us (missing that little cortisone dustup from 1999). But Marion Jones never tested positive either. Nor did Jan Ullrich (except for ecstasy) or Ivan Basso, for that matter. Many of the high-profile doping busts in sports had little or nothing to do with testing, and everything to do with police work. The mantle of “the most tested athlete in the world,” which Armstrong and Jones, among others, have claimed, is meaningless. And Armstrong knows it.

So he will return, and this time, everything will be in the open. A film crew will chronicle his training. Doubting journalists are invited to press conferences. And he will participate in an anti-doping test program – the most rigorous ever devised, he says – that will prove he is racing clean.

Although on its face an impressive commitment to transparency in 2009 it does little, in all honesty, to dispel the serious and reasonable doubts about his past. After all, if Armstrong is concerned about skepticism of those wins, testing fresh samples is not exactly the primary way to quell those doubts. Why not do what Ian Thorpe, the swimmer, did when he was accused of doping and offer to open any of his existing samples to retrospective testing?

The rejoinder is that to do so opens Armstrong to the kind of shenanigans that occurred in 2005, when results of a research test on samples from the 1999 Tour were leaked to l’Equipe for a story alleging Armstrong’s samples showed evidence of EPO. Retrospective testing is a Pandora’s Box for Armstrong. Because a sample degrades over time and is much more likely to be inconclusive than to somehow magically produce a substance that was never there to begin with, negative results will do little to convince the doubters. And he clearly does not trust the anti-doping authorities to perform objective testing, after the l’Equipe scandal, so a positive result is instantly controversial as well. Whatever the result, he's damned either way.

So for Armstrong, the only way forward is to embrace the cycling community’s new narrative of openness and transparency. But a film crew? Hired and paid by Armstrong? In 2004 the then-Outdoor Life Network had its own crew following Armstrong’s preparations as well for its “Lance Chronicles” series. Among the segments was one of Armstrong training in Tenerife. As Dan Coyle recounts in his book “Lance Armstrong’s War,” at one point, Armstrong stops for a blood lactate test, a highly accurate method of measuring the body’s response to training, if somewhat unusual to see outside of a laboratory. A pair of hands enters the camera’s frame, pricks Armstrong’s finger and withdraws. The unseen owner of those hands? None other than Armstrong’s controversial coach, Dr. Michele Ferrari, who was never shown in the series. Given the power of editing, a film crew will not be enough to beat back the doubters.

So a testing program, then. But who runs it? Rasmus Damsgaard currently does testing for Astana and the CSC-Saxo Bank team. But as I wrote the other day, Armstrong’s return and embrace of the new “transparently clean” ethic is a PR move. That’s not meant as a criticism, or to put down his plans or motivations. It’s merely a truth, one that applies in some measure to the other teams and athletes who participate in independent anti-doping programs. But Armstrong’s approach is more overtly about public image, and it’s unknown yet whether Damsgaard will accept that kind of politicization of his work. If not, who does the testing?

And what, exactly, is Armstrong trying to prove? In his ideal scenario, he comes back, is totally open and transparent about his training and testing and wins the Tour. In so doing, he shows that while he raced at the same time as the so-called “lost generation,” he was not of them. But this is easier said than done.

There has been a myth, built steadily, that Armstrong is a physiological freak. It is what explains his superiority, no, dominance, at the world’s hardest endurance event, and Brinkley buys in to the myth in full. “I knew from Armstrong’s memoir, It’s Not About the Bike, that his VO2 max (the gauge by which the human body’s capacity to transport and use oxygen is measured) is superhuman, his ship-sail lungs uncommonly efficient,” he writes.

The problem is that Armstrong is not superhuman. His maximum recorded VO2max is about 85 ml/kg/min. Another test put him at 82ml/kg/min, according to none other than Ferrari, who calls it “an excellent value, but common to many other professional athletes that (sic) obtained far inferior results in their careers.” VO2Max is only one measure of athletic potential, but by comparison, Greg LeMond’s VO2Max at the peak of his career was 92.5. Five-time Tour winner Miguel Indurain has been reported at both 88 and 90, and Bjorn Daehlie, a multiple Olympic and world champion cross-country skier, has the record for the highest measured VO2Max ever, at 96.

In short, Armstrong is taking a huge risk in returning. He cannot expect – certainly at 37 – to remain as dominant as he once was. And although he cites Dara Torres as evidence there’s no truth to the idea that “when you’re 38 you’re any slower than when you were 32,” the same physiologists he says claim this also see, undoubtedly, that athletic potential irreversibly declines with age. The decline can be slowed, but not halted. And in a sport where the margins between victory and 20th place are fractions of a percent, even the slightest erosion in ability could prove devastating. It’s unclear if Armstrong sees this.

In the VF piece, Brinkley modestly ventures a question about the risk Armstrong is taking. “What if you lose,” he asks Armstrong and a group of his advisors. From the article:

“A chorus of rattlesnake hisses came my way. It was clear that I wasn’t of their ilk. My naked wrists were noticeable. ‘I can’t believe you asked that,’ said a disappointed [Bill] Stapleton, deflated. ‘We don’t go there.’”

Is anyone really telling Armstrong the truth, or is he surrounded by people who only tell him what he – and they – want to hear? Even Brinkley, who muses that he may be Armstrong’s new Boswell, doesn’t really press any issue, reducing the doping question to a couple of glossed-over paragraphs reciting the Armstrong party line: (“kicked out of a French team because I was cancer sick,” and “granted, I’ll be totally honest with you, the year that I won the Tour, many of the guys that got 2nd through 10th, a lot of them are gone. Out. Caught. Positive Tests. Suspended. Whatever.”) It’s a neat dispatch of seven years of controversy, but it doesn’t reflect the real story – the soap opera – that the cycling world lived for years, or the genuine questions and doubts that remain today.

Armstrong clearly has much to lose by returning to the sport. But the question no one has – properly – asked is what is it exactly he is trying to gain.

One possible answer can be found in his roster of advisors, which includes Mark McKinnon. A two-time Ironman finisher and Austin resident who sits on the LAF’s board of directors, McKinnon is a respected public relations and media expert who specializes in politics. He created ads for both of President Bush’s election campaigns, has advised former Texas governor Ann Richards and most recently was a crucial part of John McCain’s recovery from bankrupt also-ran to the Republican presidential nominee. (McKinnon resigned from the campaign, however, when Barack Obama became the Democratic front-runner because, he said, Obama’s election “would send a great message to the country and the world.”)

While McKinnon has advised entertainment figures (like Armstrong’s friend Bono), notably absent from his roster of clients are any athletes; sports for him are a personal, not professional, endeavor. And his presence as an Armstrong advisor seems to presage something that goes far past Armstrong’s return to the bike: his possible return to the public sphere as a politician.

Hints are dropped liberally throughout the Vanity Fair article. Armstrong name-drops former President Clinton and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg for his September 24 announcement. He talks of, “Possibly inviting various heads of state to Paris around the time of the Tour.” There’s Armstrong’s laughing-but-not-really-joking allusion to running for governor of Texas. Even a date: 2014, although his one-year return to racing would easily allow a run in 2010, should he decide to bump up the timetable. He carefully balances his personal friendship with Bush against his dislike of some of the President’s policies. There’s his successful advocacy of Proposition 15, which will direct up to $3 billion in revenue from the Texas state general fund support the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. And finally, Armstrong’s own signature issue writ large:

“Obviously,” he says, emphatically, “we need health-care reform in the United States. It’s not a fair system. A third of the society doesn’t have access to decent care. It’s not right.”

This is a man intent on winning an eighth Tour de France? Not so long ago told Men's Journal for a story in its current issue, "I'm glad I'm not cycling anymore. It was fun while it lasted, and I liked it, but I'm so focused on other things now that I never think about it."

Remember, Armstrong will race for no salary, crafting his return around the architecture of a global cancer awareness initiative and, in so doing, simultaneously create a single storyline that refocuses media attention on his considerable athletic and philanthropic achievements, away from all the talk of him as a boozy skirt-chaser, an asterisk athlete?

What if the quest for an eighth Tour win is merely a stepping-stone? If it was just about proving himself clean, Astana would be a perfectly adequate sponsor. If it was just about cancer awareness, why race at all? The time Armstrong will spend training is time he can’t devote to campaigning for his cause, and the racing clean aspect will undoubtedly be as much a part of media coverage of his return as his cancer awareness goals. But if you look at it from the prism of launching the next phase of Armstrong's career, then all the jumbled pieces fall into place, a kind of Unified Field Theory of public relations, where whatever the discussion - clean racing, cancer awareness, etc. - it's about Lance, and it's all positive.

This is not a cynical appraisal of Armstrong’s likely political aspirations. I don’t presume to cast any kind of doubt on his commitment to advocacy and cancer survivors, as genuine a bond as I’ve seen. Armstrong’s 2009 Tour campaign will undoubtedly be a huge talking point for the cancer community and spark a conversation that (in the broader context of health care in this country) desperately needs to happen. But it’s not cynical to suggest that there may be more than this at work, or more than his sporting legacy. And you do have to admire the elegance of what he’s setting up here, the way it works on so many levels – personal, philanthropic, sporting and, yes, political.

About Boulder Report

Boulder, Colorado-based contributor Joe Lindsey offers investigative journalism, analysis and humor about cycling. A popular slogan in this cycling and university town is "Keep Boulder Weird." Lindsey's certainly doing his part.